It’s raining poetry in Norwalk

NORWALK — Like Norwalk’s water departments, the city’s Arts Commission is hoping for rain.

For the commission, the hope is for a downpour to expose the poetry painted on sidewalks in invisible paint, as part of the Raining Poetry Project taking over South Norwalk.

The project, started by Norwalk’s poet laureate, Laurel Peterson, was inspired by Mass Poetry, a Boston nonprofit.

“When I started as poet laureate, I said I wanted to make poetry public,” Peterson said. “The more we can encounter beauty in our daily lives, the better our daily lives are. This is a way of bringing that into the lives of people who might not otherwise have poems in their lives. This way, they get to kind of trip over them.”

In the coming weeks, Norwalk artist 5ivefingaz — known for #mygalleryisoutside — will assist Peterson by painting 10 poems in invisible paint along North Main and Washington Streets. The poems are short — only a few lines each — and range from works by well-known poets like Robert Frost and Ralph Waldo Emerson to local writers.

The paint becomes visible when wet, and Peterson said they could last several months, depending on weather and foot traffic along the sidewalks.

“This is a fun way to bring poetry to the street, connecting another type of art with the community,” she said.

Peterson is Norwalk’s first poet laureate, and is an English professor at Norwalk Community College, where she teaches interdisciplinary arts courses. She has two books of published poetry and a mystery novel.

“I think it’s really cool that it is an artistic and a poetic thing at the same time,” Peterson said. “I love that connection that makes it an artistic thing and a literary thing.”